Going back, the wind was colder and stronger. Once it almost pushed them into the street. Between the wide-spaced lights were rows of parked cars, with lovers in them, mostly students and nurses from the nearby medical school. Every few feet or so there was a car, its windows rolled up, as private in the salty fog as if the lovers were on another planet. Patsy could not resist peeping a time or two, but even near the lights all she could see were vague shapes.
“Ah, young love,” Jim said, and Patsy nodded, but as they passed more cars and remembered their own parking days—comparing them silently with the present—the thought of young love became more painful than pleasant. Jim regretted saying it. When they came to the Ford the door handles were sticky with salt spray.
“Do you envy those kids?” Patsy asked, once they were in the car. Jim took her cold hand and they tried to play with each other’s fingers but didn’t feel like it.
“I guess,” Jim said. “Our folks still think of us as kids, you know.”
They were silent, thinking about it, and then moved closer together and tried, out of mutual nostalgia, to be young lovers kissing. The attempt turned Jim hot and Patsy cold. When she put her hand behind his head she felt his newly barbered skull instead of the fine thick blond hair she liked to twist with her fingers. The kissing didn’t warm her: she felt loose and indifferent and languid. Her hair was damp with the spray and the strands got between their mouths. Patsy sat carelessly, her eyes shut, while Jim patiently picked the strands away and smoothed them back. As he grew eager she grew more uncaring and idly looked past his head at the salt-smeared windshield as he kissed her. Whatever pleasure there had once been when their mouths touched was gone and she cared so little and at that moment remembered it so dimly that she did not even feel sad or like crying about it. She let him have her cold tongue, but it meant nothing. She just wished he would grow tired of kissing her. It was distasteful to be cold in a kiss and she wished he would realize from the slackness of it that she didn’t want to kiss him any more.
But it was only when he began to kiss her that sex returned to Jim from its three-month leave. Somehow it had been absorbed by school, or killed by the worry about whether he would do well in school. There were always books and talk, one more chapter to read, one more authority to consider, one more text to scan. What was important was being bright, being alert, being informed. What he had done in three months was to become more adept at concealing his ignorance, and it had taken all his energy. Patsy had been a wife, which was enough; he had had no eye for her as a woman. But when he kissed her, sex came back, and he scarcely noticed that she was without tenderness or interest. He became too horny too quickly. His breath grew heavy and he worked a hand under her sweater. All he could reach was her heavy stomach, which had begun to curve with their child. He could not work his hand under her brassiere, nor under the waistband of her pedal pushers. She was slumped with her ankles crossed and her head back against the car seat, and he couldn’t touch any of the places he wanted to touch. When she grew tired of being kissed she turned her head and her breath tickled his neck.
“Fine place you picked to come alive,” she said. Her hair was a sticky tangle, she felt flat, and Jim’s pressing eagerness made her feel removed and remote. The male was a curious creature, she decided. She had slept by his side in a thin nightgown for six or eight weeks and he had not so much as rubbed her belly.
“We could manage here, I think,” he said, rubbing her just above the top button of her pedal pushers.
Patsy abruptly straightened up. “No, sir,” she said. “Nobody’s getting me in a car, not now. You might have managed it when we were younger, but you missed your chance.” She turned and watched the ocean roll in.
“I don’t want to drive home like this,” he said, still stroking her under her sweater. “Let’s go to a motel.”
“There’s a great suggestion,” Patsy said, not meanly, but with a yawn. “Spend ten bucks to do what we could have been doing in our own bed all this time. You can make it home. If you’ve gone this long you can go another hour.”
“Oh, quit,” he said, stabbed by the indifference in her tone.
Patsy looked at him and saw that he was hurt and that he did want her, just as she had been wanting him to. She took his hand and tried to turn herself warm, but nothing in her would turn. Holding his hand was the best she could do. She didn’t feel hostile, just very uncaring.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess there isn’t any point in my being penny-pinching about it. Suit yourself. I’d probably just as soon get screwed in a motel as anywhere else.”
She had never used the word “screwed” before in reference to them, but she felt too generally uncaring even to use polite language. It startled Jim a little, but he saw that that was all the encouragement he was going to get, and he started the car. There was something coldly exciting about going to a motel solely for sex, and as they passed the sea lights he kept glancing at Patsy, hoping she would scoot over by him. Each light showed her face differently—one petulant, one a little frightened, one aged somehow, so that she looked older to him than she ever had. She did not scoot over, and she looked at the sea instead of him.
The first four motels he tried were full, and when he finally found one that wasn’t, it was a dismal place with green and pink walls lit by green and pink neon. Patsy had been lulled again by the warm car and had all but fallen asleep against the door. When he stopped at the motel she looked at it once and then closed her eyes. The mood of emptiness was passing—she felt some emotion gathering in her, but it was a vague emotion. She was not sure what she felt, except that the motel looked dismal. Life seemed generally dismal too. When she saw Jim coming out with a key she kept her eyes closed and let her chin sink into her sweater, curious to see how far his own mood would take him. She was not sure he would actually wake her up and take her inside the drab place and make love to her. She felt willing to abide by his decision, but she refused to help him decide, and she didn’t open her eyes when he got in the car.
He got in and sat looking at her. “Patsy,” he said.
She yawned, knowing he wasn’t fooled. “What?” she said.
“Do you really want to come in?”
“I don’t want to decide,” she said, closing her eyes again.
“You’re a cheat,” he said and got out and went and pitched the room key to the desk clerk, who looked up in astonishment from the wrestling match he had been watching.
Patsy had no quarrel with the judgment he had passed on her, and even felt slightly more kindly toward him for saying it. He was sullen during most of the drive to Houston. It had started a drizzling rain and streams of mist spewed up from the tires of the cars they passed. They swirled into Houston on the wet freeway, the lights indistinct in the mist. Patsy sat up. She felt freshened and glad they had gone, and much friendlier toward Jim.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m a cheat. I’m very spoiled. Hungry too. I’ll fix us a nice sandwich when we get home. Guess what?”
“What?”
“I wish we’d gone in. I’d like to know what that place looked like on the inside. It must have been awful.”
“Great,” Jim said bitterly. “Maybe we ought to go back.”
“Please don’t be sour,” she said. “I know you have a perfect right to be but I wish you wouldn’t. Houston’s lovely when it’s drizzling.”
At home she turned and lifted her arms to him, offering herself, but Jim ignored her and peed and got a book, and Patsy happily washed her hair and made them both pâté sandwiches with pickles and hard-boiled eggs. She took him a sandwich plate and some beer. Jim was still aggrieved, but he ate hungrily. Patsy stood by his chair a long time, all clean in her robe and gown, reading Lumiansky on Chaucer over his shoulder and wishing he would touch her and forgive her her bitchiness. But he ignored her until thirty minutes later, when she was kneeling on the bed, her behind in the air, reading and fingering the drying ends of her hair. He sat across
from her and saw down the front of her gown. Her breasts were heavier. She was quietly reading The Rights of Infants, her face calm. She seemed to him very sexy. His annoyance seemed silly—she was the same old Patsy, only a little sexier. She was not at all the distant stranger she had seemed in the car. He left his book and quickly circled the apartment turning out lights. When all but the bed light were out she looked up at him, wondering, slightly surprised, a strand of hair curled round a finger. He sat beside her and put his hand inside her gown, on her warm breasts, and desire pushed at him immediately, as strongly as it had pushed at him on the beach. Patsy was quiet and cooperative, but they had been off pace with each other for hours, perhaps for days and weeks, and off pace they remained. Jim was in a great hurry and Patsy simply never turned on. She was not angry, though. “Don’t worry about it, just don’t skip so long next time,” she said, patting his arm.
Later, when he had gone to sleep, she felt itchy and a little raw and was annoyed, though at herself rather than at Jim. In earlier months, when he had worried so much about pleasing her, she had longed for him just to forget her, to approach her in blind desire and take what he wanted without worrying about her. But that was in earlier months. He had just done precisely that and instead of being carried away by it, it had just made her itchy. He had learned to be impetuous just as she had reached a stage where she would have liked some leisurely attention. She sighed and went to the bathroom, wondering if they would ever be at the same stage at the same time. When she was back in bed she shyly got Jim’s book on Chaucer off the bedside table, glad that he was asleep. He had grown defensive about her reading scholarship—he seemed to feel that it was something she would steal from him if she got the chance. She watched him a minute, to be sure he was really asleep, and then turned on her side and covertly read about the Marriage Group to satisfy her curiosity, peering over her shoulder at her husband from time to time to be sure he didn’t catch her at it.
7
THE FIRST TIME Patsy saw Hank Malory’s apartment she grew irritated and walked around with her arms folded, pouting a little with the desire to throw everything in it out. It was a small two-room second-story apartment in a chunky brick house on Albans Road. As an apartment, it was totally drab. The floors were bare; there were no curtains and curtains were badly needed, what passed for a kitchen table had an awful yellow plastic top and spindly legs that weren’t even even; some of his books were piled on an ugly white bureau, others on an old brown card table in the living room-bed room, where there was a black portable typewriter and a wastebasket full of blue books and beer cans. The bed was made but it had an ugly green bedspread, and the couch was a sagging blue object with the center cushion faded white. Surprisingly, the place was quite clean, but the cleanness only emphasized the drabness, and Patsy was annoyed. Hank Malory ought not to acquiesce to drabness, even if he was poor. She had an urge to bring him some red curtains and a bright print or poster of some kind.
They had walked over one evening to see him, for he and Jim got on well. They were both new to graduate school, and while Hank was a good deal less nervous about it than Jim it was only because he was not the sort of person to be very nervous about anything. The first time Hank asked them over they found him sitting on a little stair landing in back of the apartment looking down on the tiny back yard. He was dressed in Levi’s and a blue shirt and was barefooted. He had been reading his eighteenth-century assignment, which happened to be the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. It was still early fall—Patsy wore Bermudas and a white blouse. As she came up the steps her eyes came level with his feet and she noticed that he had corns on both his little toes.
“You don’t take very good care of your feet,” she said. “I bet you wear cowboy boots when nobody’s looking.”
Hank looked surprised and held one foot aloft to see what was the matter with it. “I never noticed,” he said, which struck her as a limp remark. It annoyed her when people she was prepared to like let themselves be taken aback by her observations; but then Hank was not very taken aback—he was just not much on repartee. She noticed later that he did have an old crumpled pair of boots in his closet. He had only one suit and one sports coat and not very many shirts. Patsy was a tireless snoop and went in and snooped the apartment thoroughly while Jim and Hank sat on the back porch drinking beer and helping each other straighten out the dramatic preferences of the speakers in the Essay. When she came back outside Hank had put the eighteenth-century anthology down and she found his place and snooped in the essay a bit. Reading the places where people stopped in books was always sport. After a paragraph or two of Dryden she sniffed and closed the book.
When she sniffed, Hank grinned at her. “You prefer McCall’s to Dryden,” he said. “I saw what you were reading this afternoon.”
Patsy blushed, taken aback herself. She read the women’s magazine’s idly but regularly at the Bissonnet drugstore, and though she said she did it for the horror of it she had come to enjoy them and knew it; but the disconcerting thing was that Hank had seen her when she had not seen him and for a minute she could not remember how she had looked. She seldom went out looking dowdy, but occasionally, when the afternoon heat made the apartment like the inside of a clothes dryer, she wandered over to the drugstore for a Coke and a magazine, sometimes in an old shift, sometimes in jeans and a shirt.
“I read everything,” she said and brightened, for she remembered that she had been quite nice that afternoon, in a red dress that Dixie had prodded her into buying on one of their excursions. She had worn her hair swept up on her head. She was not sure it had been becoming, but it certainly had been cool.
A day or two later she saw him and again she was dressed nicely and he rather shabbily. She went right over and sat down just around the corner from him and when he saw her he said, “Hi,” and scooted over two seats so they could chat. Patsy ordered a cheese sandwich and showed off outrageously about Tristram Shandy, which he was having to read and didn’t like and which she had read and loved.
“You have a good memory for novels,” he said enviously. What he really noticed were the curling wisps of black hair at her temples, and the curve of her lips on the milkshake straw, and the way she kept looking down into her glass instead of at him. What Patsy kept noticing was that he was tall and a little awkward. She was five six and a half and he was only six two, yet he was always leaning down a little and smiling at her. It made her feel strangely diminutive and feminine and flustered her a little. When she had first come up the steps and seen him on the landing she had noticed how long his calves were.
She soon concluded that he was pleased with her and didn’t care at all that she had a better memory for novels than either he or Jim. They only chatted for fifteen minutes, but somehow the chat disquieted her. She was not still inside herself for two hours when she went home. She tried to put her finger on what it was that she liked about him and couldn’t. It certainly wasn’t his manners, or his general appearance. The only really appealing thing about his face was the dent on the bridge of his nose, which for some reason she liked. He was normally so silent and noncommital that she really had no clear notion of what it was he liked about her, other than her general appearance, and from then on when she went to the drugstore she took some pains with herself, in hopes that if she met him she could tell from his response what he liked about her. She dressed simply but nicely and read either The New Yorker or the Atlantic or Vogue or some paperback, quality usually, until she had met him several times and knew they were friends and that he really didn’t care what she read. Then she went back to reading whatever was at hand. He usually read Sports Illustrated and scarcely had grounds for feeling superior, in any case. Soon, without really thinking about it, she knew when his classes were, what days he had seminars and what days he didn’t, and the times when he would most likely be at the drugstore. If she didn’t bump into him there when she expected to she would go home feeling slightly put out, her day lessened. They both soon noticed that they
would just as soon not see each other in other places, such as at graduate parties or beer busts. It invariably made them both edgy. It was frustrating in some way, whereas a chat at the drugstore was always pleasant and helped make a day.
Eddie Lou, the little middle-aged frizzle-haired short-order cook who could turn out hamburgers with her eyes shut, knew there was something illicit afoot months before Patsy would have allowed such a thought anywhere near the front of her mind. Eddie Lou was from East Texas and had been left by two husbands, both shiftless no-counts with roving eyes; and every time she saw Hank and Patsy looking happy and glancing at each other between sips of something and chatting about books she would never read or picture shows she would never see, the East Texas soul in her stiffened and she burned their hamburgers, if they were having them, or left the grilled cheeses on too long, or neglected to give them pickles, which she knew Patsy liked. It annoyed her all the more that they were usually so absorbed in each other that they ate the burned hamburgers as if they were delicious. What made matters even worse, in Eddie Lou’s opinion, was that Patsy had the sweetest husband in the world as it was. Jim was her special pet. He joshed her a lot and had spent the summers of his boyhood in Gladewater, where Eddie Lou was from, so they had much to talk about. To Jim she was especially nice. She kept his milkshakes thick and gave him potato chips whether he had them coming or not. She was convinced calamity was not far off and she was determined to help him through it in whatever way she could.
Eddie Lou’s forebodings, though justified, were quite premature. All through the fall no improper word passed between Patsy and Hank, and no improper tone was struck. So reticent was Hank, so little prone to reveal whatever emotion he might feel, that Patsy even became a little frustrated. Their chats were, if anything, too proper. She felt his regard for her to be a little too slight and too impersonal. Often after a chat, sweating under her dress from the humid fall heat, she felt that pregnancy must have already taken its toll of her looks; but then, when she thought about it carefully, she knew that wasn’t true. Her looks clearly pleased him, but that they did was really small consolation. Probably her looks were the only thing about her that pleased him. He probably thought of her as no more than a pretty bagatelle, someone who would do to chat with, to ogle a bit, perhaps even to flirt with, but only in the lightest way.
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